There is something slightly irrational about apple pie. We know exactly what it is. We have eaten dozens of them. Most are perfectly fine, and “perfectly fine” is usually where the category ends. Then one appears that is tart enough, crisp enough, fragrant enough, properly spiced enough to make someone look up from the table and ask where it came from. That is the pie we were looking for here. Not the most famous pie, not the pie with the prettiest website, and not the one that tastes transcendent five feet from the bakery oven. We wanted to know which apple pies are actually worth ordering online, after the freezing, boxing, shipping, thawing and reheating that mail order requires. So we bought six apple pies ourselves, had them shipped to the same kitchen and tasted them side by side under the same conditions.
The best overall was The Elegant Farmer’s Apple Pie Baked in a Paper Bag, for its tart fruit, assertive cinnamon and extraordinary cookie-like top crust. Four & Twenty Blackbirds Salted Caramel Apple was best for presentation and gifting; Petee’s Hudson Valley Apple Bake-at-Home was our best bake-at-home pie; and Achatz Northern Spy was the best vegan apple pie we tasted.
What surprised us was how little price predicted success. One premium pie had the soggiest bottom crust in the test; an inexpensive supermarket control had some of the crispest pastry and, rather gallingly, the clearest instructions. Mail-order pie, it turns out, is not bakery pie with postage. Freezing, freight, thawing, reheating, packaging and timing all become part of the recipe.
Apple pie is memory wearing a crust. When the pie has to travel, it has a harder assignment than simply tasting good.
Extra Fine is where I hunt down the small luxuries worth the splurge, the single jar, bottle or bar that makes an ordinary day better. I don’t cook much. I just have very strong opinions about the good stuff.
At a glance: 6 apple pies tasted side by side • 4 recommended • best overall / gift / bake-at-home / vegan • fruit, spice, crust, shipping and memory
All photographs are by Pamela Thomas-Graham for Dandelion Chandelier.
mail order apple pie: what actually arrived at our door
This was not a reputation roundup. We bought every pie ourselves online or at the supermarket; none was supplied by a bakery or brand. All six were shipped to the same kitchen, baked or reheated according to the instructions provided, and tasted by the same two people under the same conditions. We judged what actually arrived at the door, not what the pie might taste like fresh at the bakery.
Yes, the bag goes in the oven.
That distinction changed the rankings. A pie can have beautiful fruit and still lose ground because the bottom crust collapses in transit. Another can become more impressive because its pastry survives freezing and reheating unusually well. Instructions matter more than anyone expects when dinner is approaching and the center is still frozen. Packaging matters if the pie is being sent as a gift rather than ordered for your own kitchen. And a bakery’s reputation cannot crisp a soggy crust.
We scored what mattered in a mail-order pie: flavor, fruit character, crust, texture, arrival condition, packaging, instructions, baking or reheating performance, gift readiness and how the pie held up the next day. Two tasters ate every pie, one who likes dessert with a definite punch of flavor and one who prefers considerably less sweetness. Where we disagreed, the disagreement stayed in the review. Averaging it away would have been tidier and less useful.
We also built in two reference points. The ceiling was the fresh apple pie our family collects every year from a local orchard, the pie that has quietly become part of the holiday grammar in our house. The floor was Marie Callender’s Lattice Apple Pie from the supermarket freezer, baked alongside the others. Without the inexpensive control, a tasting of premium pies can tell you which expensive pie is best. It cannot tell you whether the premium itself is buying anything you can taste.
Apple variety matters here, too. Northern Spy, Crispin, Ida Red and Granny Smith do not behave identically under heat. Some keep their shape; some bring acidity; some soften the filling; some carry more perfume. Once fruit has been frozen, shipped and reheated, those differences become even more important because excessive sweetness and mushiness have nowhere to hide.
the verdicts, at a glance: the best mail order apple pies
| Brand | The pie we tasted | Verdict | Gift readiness |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Elegant Farmer | Apple Pie Baked in a Paper Bag | Best overall taste. Ida Red apples, assertive cinnamon and a distinctive cookie-like top crust. Tart, spicy and memorably apple-forward. | Fair. Delicious by the slice, but ours emerged from the bag looking rather less triumphant than it tasted. |
| Four & Twenty Blackbirds | Salted Caramel Apple | Best for presentation and gifting. Hudson Valley apples, beautifully flaky pastry and restrained sweetness. | Excellent. The most polished arrival in the test and the easiest one to send directly to someone else. |
| Petee’s Pie Company | Hudson Valley Apple Bake-at-Home | Best bake-at-home. Northern Spy and Crispin apples; mild, buttery and classic, with the considerable bonus of making the house smell like a baking show. | Poor. This pie arrives raw and plainly packaged. |
| Achatz Handmade Pie Co. | Northern Spy Apple | Best vegan pie. Michigan Northern Spy apples and exceptionally flaky pastry, including a bottom crust that stayed crisp after reheating. | Excellent. Attractive packaging and entirely presentable as a gift. |
| Little Pie Company | Sour Cream Apple Walnut | Not recommended. Excellent streusel and outer crust, but the fruit disappears into the filling and the bottom was the soggiest we tasted. | Fair. Presentable, although I would send another pie. |
| Marie Callender’s | Lattice Apple Pie | The supermarket control, and surprisingly good. Crisp crust, nicely set filling and excellent instructions; less apple character than the craft pies. | Fair. It is a supermarket freezer pie, which is why it belongs in the test. |
Gift readiness means whether the pie arrived attractively packaged, intact and presentable enough to send directly to someone else without repackaging or explanation.
The rankings did not simply reproduce bakery reputations. Shipping changed them. Crusts that sounded impeccable on paper softened. A vegan shortening crust proved remarkably resilient. One premium pie came with instructions that left too much to interpretation, while the supermarket control anticipated nearly every question. And the pies we would order for our own table were not always the ones we would send directly to someone else. The best bakery pie and the best mail-order pie are not necessarily the same thing.
A pie you order for yourself has only to survive the trip and reward you for turning on the oven. A pie sent directly to a friend, parent, host or someone who cannot be at your table has another job. The box itself becomes part of the gesture.
novice cook alert: the baking instructions may be hard to find
The most consistent weakness in the tasting had nothing to do with pastry. It was information.
Several pies arrived frozen with directions that assumed a rather intimate understanding of what “bring to room temperature” means when the object in question is a solid block of fruit and pastry. In practice, a frozen pie can want an overnight thaw in the refrigerator and additional time out before serving or reheating. Planning to remove it from the freezer after lunch for dinner that evening is an excellent way to discover an arctic core at precisely the moment everyone wants dessert.
A lined baking sheet is equally useful. Fruit bubbles, sugar escapes and pie tins become sticky; none of this is tragic if there is parchment underneath it. Ovens also remain stubbornly individual. Two pies in our test wanted more time than their directions suggested, so a browned, set crust and hot filling were more reliable than obedience to the timer.
Pretty box, poor information flow.
The supermarket pie, somewhat impolitely, handled all of this best. It told us the temperature, baking time, cooling time, what to place underneath the pie and what to do if the edges browned too quickly. One expects more from an expensive food product than a beautiful box and the confidence that everything will probably work out.
the four apple pies worth the freight cost to order online
1. the elegant farmer apple pie baked in a paper bag: the one we kept eating.
The Elegant Farmer’s famous method sounds like homespun theater until you taste what it does. Ida Red apples bake inside a sealed paper bag beneath a delicate, sugar-cookie-like top crust. The result in our kitchen was firm, tart fruit, confident cinnamon and the best single piece of pastry in the tasting. The top was crumbly and crisp rather than conventionally flaky, almost halfway between pie crust and a very good sugar cookie, while the filling stayed juicy without becoming loose or soupy. Reheated the next day, it was still the pie we wanted another slice of.
There is one complication, and it is not subtle. The bag adhered to parts of the crust, so removing it left our pie looking as though it had endured a small transportation incident after the transportation incident. The bottom crust was merely good rather than remarkable, and ours needed a little longer in the oven than the stated window. None of this changed the taste verdict; it did change the presentation verdict.
The winner, after the bag.
The Elegant Farmer apple pie is not . . . elegant, particularly once liberated from the bag. However, when it comes to pie, elegant can be overrated. It’s irresistible, fragrant, crunchy, sweet, spicy and delicious. If the pie is going onto your own table, slice it in the kitchen and take the compliments. However, if the intact pie needs to make an entrance, or hold its own on a buffet table, keep reading.
2. four & twenty blackbirds salted caramel apple: the one that knows how to arrive.
Four & Twenty Blackbirds makes the beautiful one. Its Salted Caramel Apple uses Hudson Valley apples, caramel and a spice profile that includes Angostura bitters, finished with flake salt. The pastry arrived deep golden and distinctly layered, with genuine flake all the way to the outer rim. That matters because the outer rim of the crust is where mediocre pie reveals itself. The filling is gone, the ice cream has melted, and suddenly one is alone with the pastry.
This is what gift-ready looks like.
The filling held its shape and produced a handsome slice. Flavor was more divisive. One of us wanted greater sweetness and more cinnamon; the other thought the restraint was exactly right. Neither of us could really find the caramel, despite making a sincere effort. That understatement is part of what makes the pie work. Too much cinnamon is not hospitality, and too much caramel is not generosity. It is the same principle that separates great ice cream from the forgettable kind: restraint, proportion and an understanding that pleasure does not need to shout. We explore that in great detail in The Freezer Edit: The Best Gourmet Ice Cream Brands to Order Online.
This restraint also makes Four & Twenty unusually useful on a dessert table, especially when several other sweets are already lobbying aggressively for attention. It was the strongest gift in the test as well. The pie arrived composed enough to send directly to another household without a whispered apology or emergency replating. When dessert is standing in for your physical presence, that polish matters.
3. petee’s hudson valley apple bake-at-home: for people who want the house to participate.
Petee’s approaches apple pie from the fruit outward. Its Hudson Valley pie combines Northern Spy and Crispin apples, an intelligent pairing because one brings tartness and structure while the other softens the edges.
The version we tested arrived frozen and raw. About half an hour into baking, the house began to smell like apples and spice and someone’s grandmother had quietly taken over the kitchen. This is the bake-at-home pie’s great advantage: the difficult work belongs to somebody else, but the fragrance belongs to you. The finished pie was mild, buttery and classically American. Its crust was soft but not soggy, the first slice came out cleanly, and nothing about the filling was likely to provoke an argument. Beside The Elegant Farmer, however, it tasted restrained rather than exciting; on its own, the restraint felt comfortable.
I confess, I am exactly the target consumer for this proposition. I would like dessert to be excellent, I have no particular wish to make pastry, and I am delighted to allow the oven to imply greater domestic accomplishment than actually occurred. Good butter matters enormously in pastry, of course, which is one reason we once subjected nineteen of them to their own Extra Fine tasting, The Best Brands of Gourmet Craft Butter.
One caveat: I would buy Petee’s for my house rather than send it as a present. The packaging could kindly be described as utilitarian. And because the pie arrived raw, the recipient inherits both the pleasure and the responsibility of baking it. For the right person that may be appealing. For everyone else, a gift should generally arrive having completed more of its own homework.
4. achatz northern spy apple: the vegan one that wins on crust.
Vegan apple pie is an interesting test because the apples are not the issue. Pastry is.
Our Achatz pie used vegetable shortening rather than butter, which made the result particularly instructive. The crust was flaky on both top and bottom, and the bottom remained crisper after reheating than any of the other shipped pies we tried. That is a useful little rebuke to all-butter orthodoxy. Butter brings flavor, but shortening has structural advantages, and a pie that has been frozen, shipped and reheated is not competing in the same event as pastry eaten warm beside the bakery oven.
Shortening makes its case.
The filling was less compelling. Spice reached us before apple, then sugar followed, and I prefer that sequence reversed. It was a good filling inside a better crust, rather than the other way around.
Still, this is exactly what one wants when a vegan dessert is needed at a mixed table: something everyone can eat without the entire pie announcing itself as the accommodation. The packaging also arrived cheerful and intact, making Achatz one of the two easiest pies here to send directly as a gift.
the pie we wouldn’t reach for
little pie company sour cream apple walnut.
On paper, Little Pie Company’s Sour Cream Apple Walnut has everything going for it: Granny Smith apples, sour cream and a brown-sugar, cinnamon and walnut streusel.
The streusel on ours was genuinely delicious, as was the outer rim of crust. The problem was beneath it. The apples had been cut so thinly that they largely surrendered their identity to the surrounding filling; sour cream became a dominant voice, sweetness moved forward, and what should have been the protagonist became supporting cast.
The fruit was outvoted.
Excellent streusel. The apples disappeared.
The bottom crust was also the soggiest of any pie in our apple tasting. That is enough to send me elsewhere for apple pie, although not elsewhere from the bakery. Little Pie Company’s sweet potato pie was one of the best things we ate in the larger tasting. These are verdicts on individual pies, not lifetime appointments for bakeries.
the supermarket pie crashes the party
For the control, we bought a Marie Callender’s Lattice Apple Pie from the supermarket freezer, baked it in the same kitchen during the same tasting and put it onto the same plates. The point was not to be provocative. It was to give the expensive pies something harder to beat than one another.
Dear reader, this far more affordable apple pie is really tasty.
Eight dollars enters the chat.
The top and bottom crusts were crisp, the rim browned nicely, the filling set properly and a little brightness kept the whole thing from collapsing into sugar. It also went directly from freezer to oven and came with instructions that anticipated virtually every question we had been left to solve for ourselves elsewhere.
What it did not have was the same depth of fruit. The apple flavor was more muted, with more syrup in the filling and less sense of a particular apple having once existed. That difference is real. It is also narrower than the difference in price, ceremony and effort might lead one to expect.
The supermarket pie did what a good control should do. It made every expensive pie explain itself.
so what does the premium cost actually buy?
After six pies, two tasters, multiple thawing and reheating schedules, one supermarket control and considerably more oven time than I normally devote to anything, the answer became unexpectedly simple.
First, better fruit. In the strongest mail-order pies, apple remains an identifiable flavor rather than a generic filling. Tartness, texture and fragrance survive the sugar and spice. That is the deepest difference between the supermarket control and the pies at the top of our list.
Second, distinctive pastry. The Elegant Farmer’s cookie-like top crust and Four & Twenty Blackbirds’ laminated pastry are not simply better crusts; they are different ideas about what apple pie can be. Achatz complicated the picture further by showing how well a vegan shortening crust can survive freezing and reheating.
And third, sometimes the premium buys the gift itself. That is easy to underestimate if you are ordering dessert for your own house. A pie may also be going to a parent in another city, a friend recovering at home, a host before a weekend visit or someone who simply cannot be at your table. In that case, appearance on arrival is not frivolous. It is part of the message.
What the premium did not reliably buy was convenience, lucid instructions or a crisp bottom crust. Those remained stubbornly democratic.
So I would order a mail-order apple pie for one of three reasons: because I wanted noticeably better fruit, because I wanted a particular pastry or bakery style, or because I wanted to send a pie where I could not go myself. Those reasons survived the tasting. Prestige for its own sake did not.
Apple is only one branch of the argument. The Sweet Course also takes in layer cakes, ice cream, chocolate, marshmallows, hot chocolate and the broader world of pie, because sometimes allegiance lies with pecan, cherry, pumpkin or chocolate cream and there is no point pretending otherwise. Explore The Sweet Course in Extra Fine.
and then there is the pie from that place
Every year, we host Thanksgiving, and every year somebody drives about thirty minutes north to an orchard to collect an apple pie. An hour in the car during an exceptionally busy week, for a dessert we could buy ten minutes from home.
It would plainly be easier not to do it. But within fifteen minutes of arriving every year, my brother asks the same question: Did you get the pie from that place again this year?
Nobody needs the name of the orchard anymore. “That place” is enough.
That pie became the ceiling for this tasting: not because we assumed it was better, but because every year we eat it fresh enough to know exactly what good apple pie can be before freezing, freight and reheating enter the equation.
This is why apple pie is such an oddly difficult food to rank. The best pie is partly fruit and spice, pastry and temperature, and partly anticipation and memory. Someone is still thinking about it from last year. Someone made a detour for it. And someone would notice if it was missing.
The mail-order pies have a different opportunity. They can make that detour on our behalf. Sometimes the pie is traveling because we do not want to bake; sometimes it is traveling because we cannot be there ourselves. The best ones understand that they are carrying more than dessert. The pie people remember is rarely the one that happened to be there. It is the one someone chose on purpose, with care.
The larger Extra Fine proposition is the ordinary thing, chosen better: butter, salt, jam, ice cream, pie and the other small pleasures that reveal rather more about taste than they have any right to. Explore Extra Fine.
faqs:
what is the best mail-order apple pie to order online?
The Elegant Farmer Apple Pie Baked in a Paper Bag was the best-tasting mail-order apple pie in our side-by-side test. Its tart apple filling, assertive cinnamon and distinctive cookie-like top crust gave it the strongest overall flavor. Four & Twenty Blackbirds Salted Caramel Apple is the better choice when presentation and gift readiness matter equally.
which mail-order apple pie makes the best gift?
Four & Twenty Blackbirds Salted Caramel Apple was the most gift-ready pie we tested, with Achatz Northern Spy close behind. Both arrived attractively packaged and intact enough to send directly to another household. The Elegant Farmer tasted better overall but was considerably less handsome once removed from its paper bag.
is mail-order apple pie worth it?
A good mail-order apple pie is worth ordering when you want more distinctive fruit, an unusual or particularly good crust, a specific bakery style, or a pie that can be sent as a gift. Our tasting showed that a higher price does not automatically produce clearer instructions, greater convenience or a crisper crust, so the premium should buy something you can actually taste or value.
what should you look for in a mail-order apple pie?
Look first for fruit that still tastes distinctly of apple and a crust that survives freezing, shipping and reheating. Clear handling instructions matter more than they seem, and if the pie is a gift, packaging and appearance on arrival deserve separate consideration. A beautiful bakery pie that deteriorates in transit is not a successful mail-order pie.
does shipping change the quality of an apple pie?
Yes. Freezing, transit, thawing and reheating can materially affect crust crispness, filling texture and presentation. That is why we judged these pies as they actually arrived rather than relying on their reputations when eaten fresh at the bakery.
what is the best bake-at-home apple pie to order online?
Petee’s Hudson Valley Apple Bake-at-Home was our favorite bake-at-home pie. It produced a mild, buttery, classic apple pie and filled the kitchen with the aroma of apples and spice while it baked. Its presentation was less suitable for sending directly as a gift, so we would choose it primarily for our own table.
what is the best vegan apple pie to order online?
Achatz Northern Spy was the best vegan apple pie we tasted. Its double crust was exceptionally flaky, and the bottom remained crisp after reheating. The filling leaned more heavily toward spice than apple, but the pie worked as dessert for the entire table rather than as a conspicuous substitute for one guest.
